Subtle Exploitation on Pinterest too often goes unnoticed

For many years, multiple Pinterest accounts used a very sly method of exploitation to garner more clicks. They all followed a very similar approach that can be broken down into something like this:

• Identify target
• Create fake content en masse (both before and after the advent of AI and deepfakes)
• mass Publication and promote for clicks

They would first identify a ‘target’, which would usually be someone with limited view in the public eye. The reason that they would choose someone who had limited public visibility is to avoid detection. If they chose a big-name celebrity like Brad Pitt or Johnny Depp (not that some haven’t, but were not successful) then they would be found out and banned very quickly. Most instead chose to use more obscure celebrities, such as small-scale actors and models (people who have some pubic visibility, but not so much that they would be easily identified as an exploitation target).

Once they had selected their target and built up their accounts around such personas, they would then use whatever they could (photoshop, AI, etc.) to mass-produce fake or misleading media around them. This sort of media would often contain controversial aspects, yet because of Pinterest’s poor detection algorithms and user’s abilities to circumvent systems, these accounts would often go undetected, sometimes for years.

Interestingly, I believe that the rise of AI content has been both beneficial and detrimental to these people: while the mass production of AI content on Pinterest (and other platforms) has undoubtedly diluted the reach and appeal of these accounts contents, these accounts still exist out in the aether of Pinterest’s murky web, and likely get off on the use of modern AI tools to further their greedy exploitations for clicks.

Signs to look out for

If you use Pinterest, the main signs to look out for are:

• accounts centred around real celebrities
• accounts centred around obscure celebrities (Google the name of in doubt)
• accounts which are not necessarily named after a celebrity, but primarily posts media based around a specific celebrity or small group of celebrities
• accounts which produce unsettling content around celebrities

One of the biggest getaways these creeps have is a general behaviour habit on Pinterest, that general scrollers don’t tend to visit often the profile of the account that has uploaded, instead usually looking and either liking, saving, or simply scrolling past. But we can break these habits by scrutinising suspicious pins all the better.

Thanks for reading. I’m aware I’m probably not saying anything that’s ‘new’ or ‘unknown’, but it’s something I’d like to help bring to attention, if only to help in the pushback against it.